Intelligence is a term that is difficult to define, and it can mean many different things to different people. Intelligence is often defined as the general mental ability to learn and apply knowledge to manipulate your environment, as well as the ability to reason and have abstract thought. In education, Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or challenging situations. In psychology, it is the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria; for example IQ test. It is thought from deriving a combination of inherited characteristics and environmental such as developmental and social factors. General intelligence is often said to comprise various specific abilities like verbal ability, ability to apply logic in solving problems. There are two types of intelligence quotients: emotional and intelligence quotient. Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EQ) is Continue reading
Modern Management Concepts
Change Agents in Organizational Change
Organizations and their managers must recognize that change, in itself, is not necessarily a problem. The problem often lies in an inability to effectively manage change : not only can the adopted process be wrong, but also the conceptual framework may lack vision and understanding. Why is this the case? Possibly, and many practicing managers would concur, the problem may be traced to the managers’ growing inability to approximately develop and reinforce their role and purpose within complex, dynamic and challenging organizations. Change is now a way of life; organizations, and more importantly their managers, must recognize the need to adopt strategic approaches when facing transformation situations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s organizations, both national and international, strived to develop sustainable advantage in both volatile and competitive operating environments. Those that have survived, and/or developed, have often found that the creative and market driven management of their human resources can Continue reading
Business Strategy Games
The Business Strategy Game is a hands on learning exercise that will give managers valuable decision-making practice and develop powers of business judgment. Business strategy games involving management process before confirming the decision to be made. Lesson learned taken from the business game, from the process and the content from the case (industry and situation & condition of the business) is used for decision making. Various processes involved in business strategy games are; Management Process Planning was the first process taken. Reading and understanding the relevant information was necessary and plays a significant role in planning process. Expectation was established in the planning, and followed stepping process until all aspects have been determined, including all distinctiveness in production (capacity, model, etc.), transportation (shipping), labor, etc. Planning is critical, and it was indicated in the business strategy games, in which it required quite some time to achieve an agreement. Time Continue reading
Minimizing Resistance to Change through Discussions
When as many as possible of those people involved in a change understand as much as possible about it and its consequences, resistance is likely to be reduced. It is management’s job to develop this understanding. Resistance will be prevented to the degree that the change agent help the change affected people to develop their own understanding of the need for change, and an explicit awareness of how they feel about it and what can be done about their feelings. Such an understanding will occur only when the information provided is sufficient, factual and accurate. Management can transmit information about a proposed change and its probable consequences to those affected or concerned in a variety of ways. Fundamentally, there are only three practical media for communication; written material, audio-visual and oral. No single means, however, should be relied on exclusively. The more complex the change, the greater will be the Continue reading
Knowledge-Sharing Dilemmas in Organizations
Information being exchanged amongst the workers of an organisation is a system that has been an essential constituent of the procedure of knowledge management. With the introduction of the contemporary information and communications technology within corporations, it has become very convenient and has also become a valuable support function to make such exchanges possible by reducing the obstructions of time and distance. On the other hand, those corporations that have invested in technologies of this kind are frequently faced with the complications of inducing the workers to utilize the purpose of those technologies in order to communicate their knowledge and perceptions. The knowledge share/hoard predicament is a socio-psychological behavior aspect that describes that employees feel the need to not share information or organisational knowledge that they posses because it may eventually harm their own status within the organisation or by sharing knowledge may therefore provide a competitive advantage to their Continue reading
The Four Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence
The four branch model of emotional intelligence proposed by Salovey and Mayer, that identified four areas of capacities or skills of emotional intelligence: the perception of emotion, the ability reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions. According to Salovey and Mayer, the four branches of their model are, “arranged from more basic psychological processes to higher, more psychologically integrated processes. For example, the lowest level branch concerns the (relatively) simple abilities of perceiving and expressing emotion. In contrast, the highest level branch concerns the conscious, reflective regulation of emotion” (1997). Salovey and Mayer add that abilities that “emerge relatively early in development are to the left of a given branch; later developing abilities are to the right.” They also say that, “people high in emotional intelligence are expected to progress more quickly through the abilities designated and to master more of them.” The Continue reading